Christo for Kids

If it's Friday, it must be time for what to do this weekend.

This being Halloween-y, The Arts Muse would be remiss without spotlighting "The Great Jack O' Lantern Blaze" at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson through Sunday. I like to think of it as Christo's "The Gates" for kids. (It's orange, it's outdoors, it's a happening: You get the picture.)

The blaze — which is being featured on ABC's "Good Morning America" tomorrow and "CBS News Sunday Morning" — includes 4,000 individually carved, illuminated jack o' lanterns set amid the riparian, 18th-century charms of Van Cortlandt Manor. Every year's blaze is different. For this, the fifth anniversary, Historic Hudson Valley — administrator of the site — has added sunflowers, a UFO, a beehive and a replica of Henry Hudson's Half Moon. 914-631-8200, www.hudsonvalley.org.

If you happen to be hunkering down with the leftover candy (come on, you know you're going to stash away a few pieces), you won't want to miss PBS' "Masterpiece Contemporary," which has a doozy of a thriller, "Place of Execution" (9 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 8). Juliet Stevenson — who's been so marvelous in works ranging from "The Race for the Double Helix" to "Emma" — is first-rate as a harried documentary filmmaker and working mom investigating the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl in northern England 40 years earlier.

That event, which unfolds alongside the contemporary story, turns out to have unusual resonance for the filmmaker. It's a juicy, engrossing drama that reminds us that the most terrifying things are not the ghosts and goblins but the ones that can really happen.

Photo courtesy of Historic Hudson Valley.